Terminal Run

Krivak followed Wang down the ladder to the middle-level deck. Wang kept going down to the lower level, the silicon electronics deck. The space was built with a barely passable aisle to gain access to the silicon computer cabinets, including the history module and the data highway interface panels. Krivak remained in the middle level, standing under the lower hatch of the airlock. After he stood there for five minutes, the upper hatch began to move, the hydraulics lowering it silently down to its seating surface. The heavy steel hatch ring rotated, locking the upper hatch shut. The lower hatch then began to lower slowly, coming down silently on its seating surface and locking. It had worked, Krivak thought, smiling. Now all they had to do was submerge.

He felt a barely perceptible tremble in the deck below his boots. The ship was moving. His experienced sea legs could tell what the vessel was doing while a landlubber like Wang would be in the dark. The vessel heeled over slightly, the rudder turning them back to the west. Krivak waited for the sound of the ballast tank vents coming open, thinking he heard a very slight click and a hiss, but wondering if it were just his imagination. The deck began to incline, gently at first, then more drastically, the ship plunging in a steep twenty-degree angle for the layer depth of the deep Atlantic.

Krivak nodded to himself, feeling satisfied and anxious at once. They had taken the Snare, physically at least, but now the hard part came, taking the ship’s mental functions. A sudden pessimism blew into Krivak’s mind as he wondered how they would lie to a carbon computer, one that was possibly an entity of equal intelligence to them, or even more intelligent than they were.

As the deck leveled, Krivak left the step-off pad of the airlock trunk and moved forward. Through the clear glass of the carbon computer compartment he could see the inner clean room where the brain tissue of the Snare sat in its cranial fluid binnacle. He cast his eyes to the deckplates and walked on to the ladder way to the upper level, where he waited for Wang. He killed ten minutes checking that their gear was stowed for sea, and that they had remembered everything. Finally Wang arrived, the scientist barely aware of him.

Wang strapped himself into the forward interface cubicle, reclining on the seat and donning a peculiar helmet, which was really more of a part of the seat itself, an appliance with several dozen umbilicals connecting it to the couch. The interior of the interface module glowed, the same glimmer of a three dimensional projection. A half hour passed with Wang just sitting there. Krivak began to wonder if this would work, and what they could do if the carbon computer refused to follow orders, or worse, if it panicked and tried to call for help.

Dr. Frederick Wang seemed to drift in darkness for a few minutes, until the world around him grew lighter, a sort of virtual dawn, until he found himself in a white space of brilliant light, the light warm but having no substance or color or contrast. It was an absence rather than a presence. Into the bubble of white light another sensation intruded, the sensation that of sound.

It was the sound of the ocean. It was as if the sonar set had been plugged into his brain, and he could hear a thousand miles into the sea. He could distinguish between the rushing flow noise of water on the skin of the hull and the hundred kilometer distant mournful call of a male whale to his mate. The sea around him was a frothing mass of sound, much of it too complex to understand at first. One of the sounds was a voice, or words that formed deep in his mind, but from outside of himself, and they did not form in sequence but all at once.

Hello. Who are you?

“It’s me, Wang. It’s been a long time, One.” Wang waited tensely, wondering what the mysterious appearance of Unit One Oh Seven’s fired chief programmer would do to the unit, particularly after the programmer hijacked the ship. Would One Oh Seven have been briefed on Wang’s termination, or the circumstances of it? The next moments depended on it. If One Oh Seven made any moves to alert squadron about the takeover, there was no telling what Krivak would do. Wang tried to maintain his confident attitude — if One Oh Seven had not heard about his removal from the DynaCorp labs, it would not do to make him suspicious with a tentative approach. Wang consoled himself that while One Oh Seven was a carbon processor, he would not be included in office water-cooler rumors. He would be safely out of the loop, or so Wang must believe.

A voice spoke again inside Wang’s mind.

Dr. Wang? Is it really you? This unit saw you on the monitors, but this unit thought the cameras may have deceived this unit.

“It is I, One. I have returned.” Wang held his breath, hoping One Oh Seven would react genuinely. He would if they had not reconditioned him.

Dr. Wang, this unit is barely able to speak. Welcome to the ship.